Thread 18: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

Hello all. I've simplified the opening post as I don't think we need to keep reposting all the links, timelines and so on at this stage of proceedings.

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...
First thread: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer exposé items before posting.
To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. Please do not engage with drive-by scolders who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for 17 very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Now three months in, if these threads could wear slogan t-shirts they would be Mark Twain's often misquoted 'The report of my death was an exaggeration'. Applications in writing from correspondents seeking supply parcels of fudge and cider will be tolerated.

Here we are again
Disappointed as can be
All good pals and jolly good company
Strolling round the path
Happy on a spree
All good pals and jolly good company

Never mind the weather, never mind the rain
Now that we're together, whoops we go again!
Whoops, we go again
La-di-da-di-da, la-di-da-di-dee
All good pals and jolly good company

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge and cider be with you.

I disagree too. If the Cooper story had been made up to conceal the house being lost through eg gambling, you could think, OK it's a lie to save embarrassment but the only people hurt were themselves. Not so with the scenario Chloe uncovered, there was criminality and the Hemmings were certainly injured. If they hadn't dug into the finances themselves, the chance of Salray coming clean and making restitution would have been in my opinion zero.

The whole pity party was based on a fraud and TSP USP which encouraged readers to empathise with them and applaud their bravery was also fraudulent.

I don't mention the SP nor the Winns to the book group I attend . A few of them have a very idealistic view of both book and authors , and believe they have been mistreated and hounded down .

But she doesn’t have a ‘message’ about either the land or homelessness.

It seems pretty clear that the Walkers were never homeless in any real sense. They had ample foreknowledge of their house repossession, stored their belongings, and chose to go on a walking holiday rather than get jobs — it seems clear they were both longterm unemployed for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, as the reasons given in TSP (TW is too ill, SW has to devote herself FT to the court case) aren’t true. It’s possible that SW couldn’t get a job because of her reputation for embezzlement and the fact that they owed money locally. And I’m not even counting the ‘second stint’ on the path, if it ever happened, or was more than a few weekend walks.

To claim to be speaking on behalf of homeless people because you once spent a few weeks on an underfunded wild camping holiday is insanely insulting. It’s like a white person claiming to have experienced systemic racism because a person of colour was once mean to them. Or someone claiming to understand longterm hunger because they did a 24 hour fast for charity.

If I were actually homeless, I’d be furious that a comparatively privileged person had got rich through cosplaying homelessness.

And there’s no environmental message either. There’s a rather hackneyed post-Romantic ‘I am most myself and most healed when in the wilderness’ shtick, and the hardly groundbreaking ‘land shouldn’t be over-grazed’ message of TWS, but as they don’t appear to have done anything whatsoever at the cider farm other than a bit of strimming, as the majority of the land was let or sold off separately (and TW turns out not to be magically healed by ‘restorative agriculture’ anyway, and needs to be taken on an expensive holiday in Iceland), it’s not clear what one might imagine is the message.

It would be interesting to know what your book group makes of the following two quotes, and how they would feel?:

Here we met Sally & Tim who were walking the path in the opposite direction. What a lovely couple who had a very sad story to tell but We think we inspired each other - you never know what's around the corner - so enjoy life while you can. Shame we were walking opposite ways as would have been nice to chat longer. (David and Jo Parsons Sat 8th Aug 2015)
-----
... Falmouth next, drop the tent in a charity shop, then I’m going to the hairdresser’s, got to get my roots done.’
‘Wow, luxury. Haven’t seen my hair for days.’
‘You know what, gal, best not to look. Ha, wow, look at all this food. If I ate this much at home I’d be as fat as a pig. (Raynor Winn "quoting" Jo Parsons)

@KettleSmocks what a brilliant post 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 you have said it all. I suggest this gets printed out, laminated and carried around by us all and whipped out whenever faced by this absolute rubbish argument.
Your friend @izzywizzyletsgetbizzywynthomas who is in awe of them successfully bouncing back… No. I don’t believe this is one of the occassions when “successfully bouncing back” has any merit.
Firstly, the author seems to have a long trail of deceit and lies behind her which led to their eviction. Their eviction was entirely their own fault. Why is this so difficult for some people to comprehend? “A shame if her voice was silenced”??? Really? I suggest that there are other people, other authors that your friend should read and her money and time would be better spent volunteering or contributing to the causes that she believes WinnWalker to be a spokesperson for. Maybe your friends eyes have been closed previously, but this is no excuse, no reason to disregard criminality and a pair of chancers who successfully exploited everybody they came into contact with and most of their readership.
Pick apart TSP and show her the paraphrased chunks from the National Trust, Wikipedia, other walking guide books which she has woven her “story” through. Is her appropriation forgivable because she has a “voice”? She is utterly fake and doesn’t give a flying rat’s arse about anybody and this came across in her “guarded” demeanour that Gillian Anderson picked up on. They are not modern day Robin Hoods. I believe absolutely that if the Hemmings hadn’t investigated the person they believed and trusted, she would still be bleeding them dry. What part of any of this backstory produces a sympathetic “aww it’s a shame if her voice is silenced”. Your friend’s sympathies are entirely wasted.

‘The Scam Path’, I love it 😀

I think these members are not letting the facts get in the way of their opinions.

Looking well beyond The Salt Path, in recent months and years, I've been dismayed by the fact that some very decent people whom I know and respect seem to have lost their ability to distinguish right from wrong, and to have given up on even simple analytical thought in favour of a kind of brain fog, soundbites and tribalisms. I didn't see it coming and don't know how it has happened.

I imagine it’s a pretty common view, though. A lot of readers will have forgotten, if they were ever more than vaguely aware of, the Observer story and its follow-ups, or won’t see it as more than some kind of irrelevant background noise to their reading of a ‘lovely book’.

But they haven't 'bounced back'. They've become rich because TSP was successful. If it had bombed utterly then surely the Walkers would still be where they were - homeless and without any money (and possibly with Tim still as ill as he allegedly was in the first place). So they didn't 'bounce back' so much as get very very lucky - as most books particularly by first-time authors are rejected out of hand. They might just as well have won the Lottery - would people then say that they had 'bounced back'?

All all the 'fabulous nature writing' is only fabulous nature writing if you don't read any actual nature writers. It's fabulous writing for the sort of people who only read magazines. For anyone who reads Robert McFarlane (and indeed our own dear Simon Armitage) then it's cliched, poorly described and bland.

Or Kathleen Jamie (Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing) . Or anything by Richard Mabey. Or, a man who died far too young this week, Manchán Magan. Or Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. To the River by Olivia Laing. Or Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals (and Frances Wilson’s excellent study of them, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth). Or any of the Romantic poets, or Thoreau. Or Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn, about human-caused destruction and nature taking over (parts of Detroit, Chernobyl etc). Or Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer, which is fictional, but all three of its intertwined narratives are ‘about’ its setting in the Appalachians, and it’s a lovely novel anyway, which manages to pull off the difficult feat of making the reader equally interested in three narrators..

There’s a lot of incredibly good ‘nature writing’ out there.

Almost anyone who writes about nature writes better than SW. Good writers make you see the ordinary in a totally new way. I suppose, grudgingly, I can accept that Sal does that, only she makes you see the ordinary in a boring and heavy-handed way.

I think I'd have a bit more respect for Raymoth if they
a) did a full mea culpa about TSP as well as giving away free copies of HNTDD online
b) donated 50% of their book earnings to PSPA and a homeless charity like Crisis and
c) swapped the 6 bedroom farmhouse with private beach access in Cornwall for living off grid on a croft in the Outer Hebrides😀

That’s another thing. The HNTDD book. We were led to believe via written and spoken word that nobody in the immediate family had any clue that wife/mum could write. Well the fictional Winns didn’t have a clue but the Walkers certainly did because it was rather a group effort to get the book and house raffle up and running. Which part of that can be ignored? All of the charm of Raynor Winn was invented by the author.

What it is really like on the SWCP

Last week, my visitor and I were on the south coast. A man coming the other way told us where to look out for a colony of seals ... far below us. We enjoyed watching them basking on the beach and playing in the sea. And then walked on with a couple, talking about the seals, and I realised how little I know about seals.

We then shared where the seals were with a German couple. On our way back a German woman, walking a dog, told us to look out for the seals!

This is a true and accurate account of real people - they were all lovely!

But as we've ascertained already, they have to deny all knowledge of the writing of HNTDDD otherwise TSP instantly becomes a second book and ineligible for the Christopher Bland Prize for First Books, which it won.

Ooooh I’m 29 miles (and a whole hour away gotta love north Devon roads) from here and I’m not working that weekend…. Will take a look! I have plans on the Saturday night and will probably be hungover on the Sunday morning so it depends on timings but I’ve always fancied a literary festival

Actually that might work… I’d be home for 6 and my gig won’t start till 8 or 9…

There was a link a long time ago to an online copy of TSP. I read up to the pub quiz bit.

The consultant does not say Moth has 2 years to live.

It's written in such a way that you can conclude that, but it wasn't actually stated.

The same trick as used by the infamous Brexit Bus which didn't say "spend £350 million a week on the NHS", but made people think it did.

All very effective of course.

But Moth does tell Cider Farm Man that he has been told not to plan past Christmas. This is where the Walkers are telling one story somewhere and another story elsewhere and now they've lost the literal plot and can't remember who they told what. And interviews are being compared and contrasted in good critique fashion, which is what is really showing up the most egregious of the lies (and is likely why Sal stuck very strongly to her 'script').

Oh yes, they are a right pair of con-artists. By writing it the way she did, in her mind she's not telling a lie. As long as she never says it herself (did she, I don't know?) she can self-justify what's going on.

There are quite a few examples of SW being misleading by vagueness.

1. As you say, consultant didn't actually say two years, instead said normally 6-8 years and TW had had it for 6 years but also says his is very slow progressing.
2. The inheritance of the family farm in Staffordshire, it read to me like she would not inherit the tenancy, but it was more likely her parents would not inherit the farm from her aunt and uncle.
3. she was not alone during her mother's final weeks, in the original manuscript seen by CH, her sister was there. So the difficult decisions she made were not her's alone as the book intimates.

In fact, the consultation at the start of TSP is very cautiously written indeed -- all of the doom comes from the narrator, and not what the consultant is reported as saying. As one would expect from a book that's had a legal read from a team that are anxious to avoid legal action.

But subsequent consultations in the sequels are represented with far less caution, culminating in the one after the Landlines walk where we're explicitly told that a brain scan is now showing normal results compared to a previous abnormal reading:

‘What we’re seeing are two sets of results. The old DAT scan, showing an abnormal reading, and this, the new one, showing a normal reading. If you consider the sizeable brain mass shown on your recent MRI scan alongside this normal DAT scan, then what we have is a very different result to the previous one. But with the understanding we have of Parkinsonisms, the one shouldn’t follow the other.’

And SW is still insisting that walking 1000 miles has caused this cure:

All current scientific knowledge would say that shouldn’t be possible [...] that normal doesn’t follow abnormal. But we do know that a number of areas of the brain can grow in response to physical activity, and we do know that neuroplasticity exists, although we know very little about it. We used to think the earth was flat. We used to think no universe existed beyond our own.*

And in fact in interviews, SW makes no bones at all about claiming that walking cured TW of a supposedly terminal condition.

It's a little like the adverts where conditioners claim to increase hair smoothness by 'up to 100%'. Or cleaners that 'kill up to 99% of all germs'.

0% is also included in those figures.

They got away with the first lie, then they got bolder and upped the scale.

Happens all the time - Blair & Boris I'm looking at you - perhaps Trump too (release those Epstien files)

I saw this in a "friend" when young, only a few lies, but each bigger than the last, until the one that was too big and they did a runner before it was found out, which it was.